Our Heritage – Going Forth With Promise ... The DuBois School

By Amy Pierce

Wake Forest is graced by a rich educational and cultural legacy. With so much attention given to the beginnings of Wake Forest University, other aspects of the town’s history sometimes go by the wayside. For this writer, a discussion of Wake Forest history and culture would not be complete – or as fertile – without the story of the DuBois School, the town’s first tax supported school for African Americans. From modest beginnings, this well-respected institution came to represent one of the most important cornerstones of the African American community – the education of its young people. 

Founded in 1922, the Wake Forest Graded School was first housed in the Olive Branch Baptist Church, where it met children’s educational needs at the primary grade levels. Additional grades were added over time and in 1939, the institution was renamed DuBois High School. In the early 1920s, the trustees of Olive Branch secured property from the family of Wake Forest College professor, Dr. W.G. Simmons, and a frame school was constructed on the property at the corner of Juniper and Taylor streets in 1924. Two years later, with funds provided by both the local African American community and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, founder of Sears Roebuck and Company, a better building was constructed. Additional land purchased in 1928 allowed the school to move to its present site on Franklin Street where, in 1939, a new high school building was constructed. Over time, additional structures came to dot the campus. 

Between 1922 and 1970, the school was a compelling influence in the lives of the hundreds of students who walked its halls, as well as in the life of the community that created and sustained it. With the advent of desegregation, the last class graduated from DuBois in 1970; the buildings then became Wake Forest Junior High, and later Wake Forest-Rolesville Middle School. When the middle school moved to a new site in 1989, the old campus was closed. 

Some 5300 Rosenwald Schools were built in the South, with 800-plus (more than any other state) here in NC. In 1993, three of the school’s buildings were placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and in the mid ‘90s, the DuBois Alumni Association purchased the property from the Wake County School Board. Renamed The DuBois Center, the buildings are being restored and the campus is again alive with both youth and elders. Building on the school’s strong legacy of education, service, and community-development, already underway at Dubois are a work readiness program, after-school tutorials, computer lab, food pantry, and mental health services. In the works are a technology center (opening later this year), and in 2007, the National Rosenwald School Museum, a Culinary Arts Institute, and a child care center.

In 1997, as a way of documenting and commemorating the enormous significance of the school and its history, Wake Forest’s Cultural Arts Association and Historic Preservation Commission joined forces with the DuBois Alumni Association to launch the DuBois History and Mural Project. Funded by numerous grants, the one-and-a-half year project ultimately involved more than 300 people from the Wake Forest community and beyond, including many DuBois alumni, three Wake Forest-Rolesville High School classes and departments, and two artists-in-residence. Research, oral histories, and in-class interviews of DuBois alumni and others culminated in Wake Forest-Rolesville students writing a play, “Go Forth With Promise,” and painting a mural depicting numerous aspects of the school’s history. The mural hangs in the auditorium lobby of Wake Forest-Rolesville High School, where it will remain until restoration allows for it to be moved to the DuBois campus. You can reach the DuBois Center by calling 554-1436 and you can visit the mural at Wake Forest-Rolesville High School during normal school hours.